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Obama pushes pipeline

The former hedge fund trader-turned-philanthropist is bankrolling a far-flung political operation pushing environmental causes and candidates, including his pricey effort to torpedo the Keystone XL oil pipeline. He's increasingly drawing scrutiny for trying to take down the Senate candidacy of Massachusetts Rep. Stephen Lynch, a Democrat who has expressed support for Keystone.

Steyer is signaling that his efforts against Lynch are just the beginning of an aggressive political expansion that could target Democrats in other races who go against environmental causes.

“This is about consequences,” Steyer told POLITICO during an interview at Boston’s Cathedral Church of St. Paul, after days of meeting with college students, faith leaders, environmentalists and clean energy executives to map out his role in the Senate campaign. “If you have a pattern of voting for subsidies for oil and gas and voting against renewables and all this other stuff … there have to be consequences. That’s the whole point of this exercise.”

The brash talk seems potentially at odds with Steyer’s continued support for President Barack Obama, who might be just months away from granting final approval to Keystone. Yet Steyer and his wife are hosting Obama at their San Francisco home Wednesday night for a $5,000-a-person cocktail reception that will benefit the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

The event will be filled with environmental and green-energy donors, who Steyer said won’t hide their feelings about Keystone from the president.

“We will certainly talk about what we care about,” said Steyer, who’s found himself walking a fine line between being a Democratic insider and a big-spending outsider who prods the party to stick to its liberal roots.

Some Democratic operatives fret that Steyer and other mega-donors could set up their party for a repeat of what happened to the GOP in 2010 and 2012, when ideologically fueled Senate primary challengers backed by super PACs and other outside groups defeated more mainstream Republicans before losing in general elections.

Noting that several Democratic senators considered vulnerable in 2014 are pro-Keystone — including Max Baucus of Montana, Mark Begich of Alaska, Kay Hagan of North Carolina and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana — one Democratic Senate campaign strategist painted a bleak worst-case scenario.

“Let’s say Steyer causes primary waves and weakens these candidates, and we lose the Senate. Then the environment is even more imperiled than it is right now,” said the strategist, who did not want to be identified questioning the judgment of a mega-donor. If spending by the Steyer-funded NextGen Committee super PAC appeared to set the stage for such a scenario, the strategist predicted, party elders would step in to try to reason with him.

“As much as the art of fundraising is never saying no to the hand that feeds you, I can't believe they wouldn't gently dissuade him,” the strategist said.

That hasn’t happened yet, said Chris Lehane, a veteran Democratic operative who worked in the Clinton White House and has become a political adviser to Steyer and NextGen.